There is no end, she seems to show us—now hilariously and now gravely—to the surprises and horrors in life. Children, like those in “Moon Lake,” are always stumbling on them: it is because Miss Welty has retained something of the child’s fresh and ingenuous view that impressions of beauty and pain are made so indelibly through her stories. Among these stories the reader will find some of her extraordinary, monolithic characters: Powerhouse, master of fantasy conveyed through music; Phoenix, with her eternally young and faithful old Heart; Lorenzo Dow, Murrell, and Audubon, each driven by his own vision, each with his burning mission. And then there are the ordinary ones: Mr. Marblehall, quietly making war with public indifference by conjuring up his own shocking double life; Livvie, too young to remain queen in Solomon’s palace, tending the old man’s wintry retirement; William Wallace, who must recover his wife by encountering the mysteries of life and birth in the depths of the Pearl River; and that whole collection of perfectly ordinary women who turn into Medusas before our eyes in Leota’s beauty parlor. The universe is dazzling and fearful, and people are remarkable. The next hitchhiker you pick up may murder his fellow in your car; the “outcast Indian Maiden,” whose savagery you exposed to a credulous public, may turn out to be an innocent and uncomprehending little clubfooted Negro, and leave you with an unhealed heart and a heavy burden of guilt; and the wonderful man from Connemara is bound to pop up like a Jack-in-the-box with his explosive “Oh my God!” about some small thing or other.

All these are human concerns for celebration by a lyricist in prose. So also is each sensuous detail of the natural world, the breath and texture of atmosphere, the color and perfume of flowers and foliage, the brightness or dimness of weather, the slow changes of the seasons and years and times of life, and the folk rituals that mark those changes. The crises produced by the unpredictable event, the outrageous act, the accident, the chance meeting, the sudden tragedy are counterpointed in Miss Welty’s fiction by the larger, steadying rhythms of nature and human feeling. We may gasp in terror or delight, but then we go on breathing just the same.